Andrea Abi-Karam

Kay Gabriel

An anthology of poems by trans writers that explores the relationship between explicitly political desires and the formal inventions possible to enact or imagine those desires.Who is writing formally exciting, explicitly political poetry right now? Editors, Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel bring together contributions by an intergenerational constellation of radical trans writers to both answer this question and enable writing in these modes. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, against capital, racism, empire, borders, prisons, ecological devastation; the writers here imagine an altogether different, overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture and the working day. The editors offer this anthology as an experiment: how far can literature written and/or collected from an identitarian standpoint go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands?

An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics

We Want It All

james cao

1. Bernadette Mayer, Utopia (United Artists, 1984), 35: "Prison wildernesses surround most of the old abandoned prisons, they are open to the public for making love and the putting on of obscene plays and poetry readings; some are also daycare centers."

I think of myself as an anarchist. I envision a world without prisons or cops where everyone has free health care and there's enough food and beer for all to participate in my socials. I want to see my landlord friends and my other friends hold hands.

first and most important dream our missing friends forward burn their reflections into empty chairs we are less bound by time than the clock maker fears

Correspondence on Erotics and Karaoke Rooms - Jo Barchi

Having a job to me feels like a betrayal of my boundaries every day, but that's just to say that I don't feel built for it. I don't feel built for caring about my labor. I fel built for caring about myself and my loved ones. I feel built for saying fuck your cOworker, and fuck any boss I've ever had who has told me I'm not doing a good enough job. I don't care.

What I'm trying to say this time is suddenly there's a lot more mud There's more of me than I'd accounted for

in the morning we hear that the government is shutting down & we hope they mean for good/& we rejoice/ because we used to think there could be art warm enough to melt the knots of hate out of the body politic / but now we know / this country was built rotten /stayed rotten the whole way through

You’ve heard of Ritalin, now what if I told you governments make bodies into crime scenes for no reason at all - Ray Filar

Why? Four years of recounting, to demand, the trans trauma of an obedient animal. Trans subjects are constituted by perseverance, but also though the confession of trauma. Unhappiness is a prerequisite of transition. In this way the deviant body is medicalised into the compliant capitalist subject.

BITCH ON WHEELS: A Speech by Sylvia Rivera, June 2001

I'm not even in the back of the bus. My community is being pulled by a rope around our neck by the bumper of the damn bus that stays in the front. Gay liberation but transgender nothing!

Mainstreaming, normality, being normal. I understand how much everybody likes to fit into that mainstream gay and lesbian community. You know, it used to be a wonderful thing to be avant-garde, to be different from the world. I see us reverting into a so-called liberated closet because we, not we, yous of this mainstream community, wish to be married, wish for this status. That's all fine. But you are forgetting your grass roots, you are forgetting your own individual identity. I mean, you can never be like them.

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